Empress of the Blues - The Turbulent Life of Bessie Smith
They called her the "Empress of the Blues." An earthy, hot-tempered, hard-drinking woman who loved wild parties, cheap hooch, and down home southern cooking. Bessie Smith didn't care a fig about what people thought about her. She worked hard and played just as hard. Bessie was black and proud; she never apologized for her color or her background. She was also fearless, at a tent performance in North Carolina in 1927, Bessie discovered that the KKK were preparing to disrupt one of her performances. She confronted the men, cursing at them to leave. Shocked, they slunk away without doing any damage. Born on April 15, 1894 in Chattanooga, TN, Bessie Smith was the daughter of a laborer and part-time Baptist preacher who died before she was a baby. Before she was nine years old, Bessie had lost her mother, and a brother as well, leaving her oldest sister Viola to raise five kids on her own. To help out, Bessie and her brother Andrew began singing and dancing on the streets f